Posts published by Michael P. Lynch

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

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Marco Rubio and Donald Trump at the Republican presidential debate in Detroit.Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

About a week before he used the national political stage to ask viewers to think about Donald Trump’s “finger” size, Marco Rubio told the audience during another recent Republican presidential debate to Google “Donald Trump and Polish workers.” They did.

The worry is no longer about who controls content. It is about who controls the flow of that content.

Rubio wanted voters to see news stories about Trump illegally hiring undocumented Polish workers more than 35 years ago to demolish a building to make way for Trump Tower. Searches for those terms, and the fraudulent “Trump University,” shot way up. It was like a public version of the now ubiquitous phenomenon of everyone whipping out smartphones to verify a disputed fact at a party or meeting. Not that it did much good in this case; as numerous commentators have noted, Trump and many of his supporters don’t seem particularly worried about minor annoyances like “facts.” (For the record, PolitiFact, which checks the veracity of politicians’ statements, judged Rubio’s charge to be “half true.”)

Nonetheless, Rubio’s Google gambit and Trump’s (non)reaction to it, reveals an interesting, and troubling, new change in attitude about a philosophical foundation of democracy: the ideal of an informed citizenry.

Political thinkers have long claimed with Jefferson that, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” The idea is obvious: If citizens are going to make even indirect decisions about policy, we need to know the facts about the problem the policy is meant to rectify, and to be able to gain some understanding about how effective that policy would be. In the larger sense, if we are going to decide who runs the country — and we are, if you think the electoral college allows for that — we need to know the facts about the candidates’ records.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

It’s been a while since we all became aware of what the National Security Administration has been up to. But as revelations of government breaches recede and the concerns of daily life resume, the public occasionally needs a reminder. A recent story in The Washington Post was exactly that. It laid out in detail what many had long suspected: that the N.S.A., in targeting foreign nationals, is collecting and storing extremely large amounts of information on many American citizens. This information is not restricted to metadata; it is content — photos, web chats, emails and the like. While United States law prevents targeting American citizens without a warrant (even if it is just a warrant from the secret FISA court) nothing currently prevents the N.S.A. from engaging in this “incidental collection” and no law prevents the agency — and other United States intelligence and law enforcement agencies — from accessing such content without a warrant into perpetuity.

We’ll get to know the consequences of our current policies on global warming. But the abuse of knowledge isn’t going to be so obvious.

Discussion of the Washington Post story has tended to concentrate on its eye-catching point that (at least) 90 percent of the data being collected is “incidental” in this way. But what, if anything, is wrong with the incidental collection of personal information? Should we be more or less alarmed by it? Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Here’s the question we should be asking ourselves right now: What next?

Even if the immediate crises — the partial shutdown and the looming debt default — are resolved, we will still be living in a dangerous political moment. The danger in question is because of the recent emergence of a political philosophy — and I mean that in the loosest sense — which threatens to unravel our joint commitment to a common democratic enterprise.

If government is the problem, shutting it down is a logical solution. We need to confront that idea.

What is the “political philosophy” I have in mind? The conservative writer John Tamny at Forbes.com puts it this way: “It quite simply must be asked,” he writes, “what the point of the Republican Party is if it’s not regularly shutting down the federal government?” No point at all, Tamny seems to think, suggesting that “shutdown should be a part of the G.O.P.’s readily unsheathed arsenal of weapons meant to always be shrinking the size and scope of our economy-asphyxiating federal government.”

It is tempting to call this “crazy talk” and unserious bluster. But it is serious, and it shows that some people are thinking about what happens next. It is a plan that represents the logical limit of the views now being entertained on the radical right, not just in the dark corners of the Internet, but in the sunlight of mainstream forums. After all, if the government is the problem, shutting it down is a logical solution. So rather than dismissing this idea, we should confront it. And we can begin to do so by asking a simple question: What are the consequences of this strategy — one that urges us to explicitly pull out of a shared contract of governance? Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

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Credit Tucker Nichols

In the wake of continuing revelations of government spying programs and the recent Supreme Court ruling on DNA collection – both of which push the generally accepted boundaries against state intrusion on the person — the issue of privacy is foremost on the public mind. The frequent mantra, heard from both media commentators and government officials, is that we face a “trade-off” between safety and convenience on one hand and privacy on the other. We just need, we are told, to find the right balance.

The connection between loss of privacy and dehumanization is a well-known and ancient fact.

This way of framing the issue makes sense if you understand privacy solely as a political or legal concept. And its political importance is certainly part of what makes privacy so important: what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. But the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

“To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle ”— that, Wittgenstein once said, was the aim of his philosophy. While it is perhaps unclear whether anyone — philosopher or fly — should be flattered by this comparison, his overall point is clear enough, as Paul Horwich notes in his recent piece, “Was Wittgenstein Right?” When we get curious about philosophical problems we are drawn into puzzles by the promise of sweet enlightenment, only to find ourselves caught in frustration (and banging our heads against the same wall over and over again). What we need, Wittgenstein thinks, is liberation — liberation from the prison of pseudo-problems we have brought upon ourselves; liberation from traditional philosophy.

Locke’s view that there are human rights didn’t leave the world as it was, nor was it intended to.

Horwich’s analysis is penetrating and important. Doubtless some will quarrel with it as a reading of Wittgenstein; but I will not — not only because I think it is largely right, but because I’m more interested in whether it is true. Not surprisingly, I have my doubts.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Suppose I offer, at no charge, to drop a drug in the water supply that would cause almost everyone in the country to vote like you this November. You would probably feel at least a little bit tempted to take the deal. Presidential politics is a matter of grave import, after all. Still — many of us would hesitate, and rightly so. There seems to be something really wrong with manipulating people to believe things even when the stakes are high. We want to convince our opponents, yes, but we want them to be convinced by our reasons.

The judgment that reasons play no role in judgment is itself a judgment. And Haidt has defended it with reasons.

This hope that exchanging reasons matters, not just for what it gets us but in itself is as old as Plato, but it has often been derided as something of a muddle-headed fantasy, as “nothing but dreams and smoke” as Montaigne put it in the 16th century. And of course there is some sense in this. Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Last fall, after Michael Lynch’s essay “Reasons for Reason” appeared in The Stone, he began correspondence with the physicist, mathematician and writer Alan Sokal about the nature and limits of scientific rationality. The following exchange is adapted from that original dialogue.

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MICHAEL LYNCH: Here’s something that often gets lost in the acrimony of the culture wars: the public debate over evolution isn’t just about evolution. It is also about which sources or methods we should trust — science or scripture — when it comes to the history of life on this planet.

As I noted in an earlier post for The Stone, “Reasons for Reasons,” this can be described as a debate over “first principles.” Not moral principles, but epistemic first principles. Epistemic principles tell us what is rational to believe and what sources and methods for forming beliefs are worthy of our trust.

Debates over epistemic principles sound abstract, but they have enormous practical repercussions. For instance, in order to decide policy matters (like what to put in our textbooks and what to teach in science classrooms) we need to decide on the facts. But in order to decide on the facts, we need to decide on the best ways for knowing about those facts. And to do that, we need to agree on our epistemic principles. If we can’t, stalemate ensues. Each side looks at the other as if they inhabit a completely different world — and in a sense, they do.

So it is perplexing, even worrying, that debates over really fundamental epistemic principles can seem irresolvable. The problem is that you can’t defend first principles without presupposing them — that is what makes them “first” principles. As a result, when debates reach this point, they can seem rationally irresolvable. We can’t defend our principles without arguing in a circle.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Does everything — even science — come down to faith?

This is a common, recurring thought in our culture. But its very persistence can seem a bit mysterious. After all, taken one way, it is easy to answer. “Science” isn’t a name for a collection of beliefs. It names a collection of methods for acquiring beliefs — methods that involve logic, observation and experiment. It is these methods that distinguish science, not doctrine. So in that sense, science is clearly not a faith — it isn’t a religion.

Nonetheless, the thought that science may still be based on something like faith remains. And there is a reason it hangs around. Like so many nagging questions, the idea that science is not free from faith contains a grain of truth.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Rick Perry’s recent vocal dismissals of evolution, and his confident assertion that “God is how we got here” reflect an obvious divide in our culture. In one sense, that divide is just over the facts: Some of us believe God created human beings just as they are now, others of us don’t. But underneath this divide is a deeper one. Really divisive disagreements are typically not just over the facts. They are also about the best way to support our views of the facts. Call this a disagreement in epistemic principle. Our epistemic principles tell us what is rational to believe, what sources of information to trust. Thus while a few people may agree with Perry because they really think that the scientific evidence supports creationism, I suspect that for most people, scientific evidence (or its lack) has nothing to do with it. Their belief in creationism is instead a reflection of a deeply held epistemic principle: that, at least on some topics, scripture is a more reliable source of information than science. For others, including myself, this is never the case.

Human beings have historically found trusting in faith to be a very seductive idea, in part because it is liberating.

Disagreements like this give rise to an unnerving question: How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles? Like many of the best philosophical mysteries, this a problem that can seem both unanswerable and yet extremely important to solve.Read more…